"I espouse certain forms of disconnection, and I am decidedly not an extrovert. Without calling Fidalgo’s experience into question, I’ve sometimes felt that my disconnectionist impulses stemmed in part from my own introversion. I’ve also linked my inability to be at ease on Twitter directly to my introversion. That is to say, I sometimes find using Twitter to be as draining an experience as navigating a crowded and unfamiliar social setting."

"A tagline on the Unii website reads ‘what happens at uni, stays at Unii’ — a not-so-veiled dig at Facebook as a vast information repository that allows potential employers to pass judgement on job applicants based on the content of their Facebook profile. Unii is purposefully locking down its user-base to make students more comfortable that they are sharing stuff only with each other, not with their parents and/or future employers."

"Baraniuk argues that this trend of narcissism as it plays out on Facebook “obscures” the true self, whereas I think it does exactly the opposite. Narcissism as it plays out on social media forces users to encounter, confess and become hyper-fixated on themselves, always with the intention of passing off their performative fictions as fact. The Foucauldian “so what?” that follows is that the hyper-fixation on the self, indeed the very invention of the self, is to keep people self-policing and self-regulating. To assume the self is natural precludes the sort of identity play that is possible and possibly transgressive."

'Nothing you do within Facebook can be “just what people do” — it’s always available to being reprocessed in an effort to reprocess you. This is the paranoid flip side to the feeling of autonomy that comes with being constantly hailed as an individual. You have the illusion that you can pilot your way through social life however you please from behind the personalized dashboard of Facebook, but then of course you realize that the screen is also the window of your zoo cage.'

"It is disingenuous and undesirable, covertly transforming an expression of enthusiasm to mercantile venture. (Of course, one can define like to include wanting something (‘I would like that box of sour apples’) but even within this money-related definition, the relationship is a direct one, between the party who likes and the apples/apple vendor). By subtly commodifying the button, Facebook enriches itself as a third party. The information was not found on their site and they have performed no service.

Within Facebook’s utopian vision of an ‘open and connected world’, this action rings hollow. No one cares that Facebook makes money, but this method – using a symbol of positive naivety – is disingenuous, untrue, and hypocritical. By structuring their information retrieval around the Like button, Facebook have potentially created a great irony, in which their highjacking of positivity results in a swelling discontent, and in time, an exodus."

"As it turns out, the way we can all express ourselves on Facebook today is literally constrained by the limits of what Mark Zuckerberg can see. I've been in environments that were constrained in similar ways; The first time I entered the Harvard Club here in New York City to visit with a friend, I felt very acutely the implicit judgments of an environment where the fact that I don't have a college education was considered a relevant way to judge my identity. And though I use Facebook, I don't ever forget that it was conceived as a private club for members of the Ivy League as well."